Survey of Ocular Prosthetics Rehabilitation in the United Kingdom, Part 1: Anophthalmic Patients' Aetiology, Opinions, and Attitudes.

Purpose: Ocular prostheses are constructed to aid cosmetic, functional, and psychological rehabilitation of anophthalmic patients. Part-1 of this study aimed to evaluate anophthalmic patients' opinions, attitudes, and experience about aspects related to their postfit ocular prostheses.

Methods: One hundred sixty questionnaires were delivered to anophthalmic patients inquiring about different information such as age, gender, occupation, eye-loss cause, prosthesis type, prosthesis-wearing frequency, prosthesis-cleaning frequency, and problems encountered. A total of 126 questionnaires were returned (response rate was 78.8%). Data was analyzed using SPSS software (P <0.05).

Results: The patients were 74 males and 52 females (57.55 years ± 17.57). Almost 50% of the patients lost their eye due to trauma that was the highest among other causes (P <0.05). High proportion clean their prosthesis daily (37.4%) which was the highest among other cleaning regimes (P <0.05). Almost 30.3% experienced having problems with their prosthetic eye. Patients who clean their prosthetic eye every 6 months have experienced more problems (P <0.05). Majority of patients wear their prosthetic eyes 24 hours (92%) (P <0.05). Half of patients who received a prosthetic eye for the first time experienced problems with it (P <0.05) such as excess discharge (45%), infection (25%), and soreness (20%). However, the problems were independent of prosthesis-type (P >0.05).

Conclusions: Trauma is the most common cause of anophthalmic patients in the North-West of England. Anophthalmic patients are likely to experience problems with their prosthetic eye if they have lost their natural eye due to disease; it is their first prosthesis; or if they clean it once every 6 months.